Methods and apparatus for rapid acoustic unit selection from a large speech corpus
First Claim
1. A concatenation cost database stored in a computer-readable medium, the concatenation cost database generated according to a method comprising:
- synthesizing a body of speech;
identifying acoustic unit sequential pairs generated in the body of speech and their respective concatenation costs; and
storing the respective concatenation costs in a concatenation cost database.
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Abstract
A speech synthesis system can select recorded speech fragments, or acoustic units, from a large database of acoustic units to produce artificial speech. The selected acoustic units are chosen to minimize a combination of target and concatenation costs for a given sentence. Concatenation costs are expensive to compute. Processing is reduced by pre-computing and caching the concatenation costs. The number of possible sequential pairs of acoustic units makes such caching prohibitive. A method for constructing an efficient concatenation cost database is provided by synthesizing a large body of speech, identifying the acoustic unit sequential pairs generated and their respective concatenation costs, and storing those concatenation costs likely to occur.
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Citations
20 Claims
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1. A concatenation cost database stored in a computer-readable medium, the concatenation cost database generated according to a method comprising:
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synthesizing a body of speech; identifying acoustic unit sequential pairs generated in the body of speech and their respective concatenation costs; and storing the respective concatenation costs in a concatenation cost database. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
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9. A concatenation cost database stored in a computer-readable medium, the concatenation cost database generated according to a method comprising:
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synthesizing a test body of text associated with an acoustic unit database; pruning acoustic units from the acoustic unit database that are not used in the synthesis of the test body of text; and storing, in a concatenation cost database, the respectable concatenation costs for sequential acoustic units in the pruned acoustic unit database.
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10. A concatenation cost database stored in a computer-readable medium, the concatenation cost database generated according to a method comprising:
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synthesizing a body of text; logging a concatenation cost for each synthesized acoustic unit sequential pair; and selecting, for entry into a concatenation cost database, a set of acoustic unit sequential pairs and their associated concatenation costs. - View Dependent Claims (11, 12)
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13. A method comprising:
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selecting a pair of acoustic units from an acoustic unit database; identifying a concatenation cost between the pair of acoustic units based on communication with a concatenation cost database; and synthesizing a speech signal using the concatenation cost for the selected pair of acoustic units. - View Dependent Claims (14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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Specification